Ishwara

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Sri Aurobindo
Collected Poems
“The World Game”

The World Game.jpg
PDF (1 page)


(Sri Aurobindo:) “She [the Divine Mother] prepares and shapes through these Powers and their emanations the minds and bodies of her Vibhutis, even as she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for the Vibhutis of the Ishwara, that she may manifest in the physical world and in the disguise of the human consciousness some ray of her power and quality and presence. All the scenes of the earth-play have been like a drama arranged and planned and staged by her with the cosmic Gods for her assistants and herself as a veiled actor.”[1]


(Satprem asks for an explanation of this sentence from August 4: “... it is easier to feel wider, higher, vaster than the world, THAN AN INDIVIDUAL. For it is easier to take everything in, to embrace and change it from outside, than to change it from inside.”)

(Mother, 1962:) “Yes, it is easier (for a Being or a Force or a Consciousness) to feel vaster than the earth than an individual.

(Satprem:) Than an individual?...

(Mother laughs) It's crystal clear to me!...
         It's a sort of reply to something I am translating in The Synthesis of Yoga. You know, there are these three aspects that must always be kept united in one's consciousness: jiva (the individual), Shakti, and Ishwara (the Supreme). He gives a wonderful description of how we have all three together in a kind of inner hierarchy. So while reading that (as I translate I have all the experiences, they come spontaneously), I kept saying to myself, “No, that jiva hampers me; that jiva hems me in! It's not natural to me.” What's natural to me is... it's probably Mahashakti. There is always that sense of creative Power, and of the Lord. The infinite, marvelous, innumerable joy of the Lord, you see, which is so intermingled with the Power – you can sense the presence of the Lord, yet you cannot distinguish or differentiate between the two. It's all a delectable play. So to introduce the individual, the jiva, into this spoils everything, makes everything so small!
         I wanted to put all this into my sentence.
         And I said it because it's quite natural for people reading in the light of their own experience to get the feeling of an individual being who is united with That – it doesn't work that way with me, I can't do it! I can't. The other movement is natural, spontaneous, wonderful – the delight of being and the delight of living. But as soon as the jiva comes, oh, I feel so hemmed in.”[2]


(Sri Aurobindo:) “One of the Upanishads speaks of the Ishwara consciousness as suṣupta, deep Sleep, because it is only in Samadhi that man usually enters into it, so long as he does not try to turn his waking consciousness into a higher state.”[3]


(Sri Aurobindo:) “It is evident that Purushottama and Parashakti are both eternal and are inseparable and one in being; the Parashakti manifests the universe, manifests too the Divine in the universe as the Ishwara and herself appears at his side as the Ishwari Shakti. Or, one may say, it is the Supreme Consciousness-Power of the Supreme that manifests or puts forth itself as Ishwara Ishwari, Atma Atmashakti, Purusha Prakriti, Jiva Jagat. That is the truth in its completeness as far as the mind can formulate it. In the Supermind these questions do not even arise — for it is the mind that creates the problem by erecting oppositions between aspects of the Divine which are not really opposed to each other but are one and inseparable.”[4]


(Sri Aurobindo, 1936:) “What was meant in the Visions and Voices [by K. Amrita] was that the Ishwara and the Divine Shakti were one Person or Being in two aspects and it puts forward this union of them as Krishna-Mahakali as of great power for the manifestation.”[5]


(Sri Aurobindo:) “The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms — so the perception in the dream was perfectly logical.”[6]


SAICE symbol The effective manifestation of Ishwara and Ishwari.jpg




  1. The Mother, p.16
  2. Mother's Agenda 1962, 4 August 1962
  3. Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p.300
  4. Letters on the Mother, p.57
  5. Ibid., p.68
  6. Ibid., p.126


See also